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On May 19, 1998, Dr. Robert Ballard, discoverer of the sunken ships Titanic and Bismarck, discovered the USS Yorktown. The Yorktown was an American ship lost in the Battle of Midway, the US-Japanese naval battle that turned the tide in the Pacific Theater of World War II. This National Geographic site is devoted to the discovery of the lost ships of that battle. It is highlighted by an interview...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Ocean Explorer Web site (last mentioned in the March 8, 2002 -NSDL Scout Report for the Life Sciences_ ) has begun several of this seasons explorations. Six new voyages have been, or soon will be undertaken and the Web pages include daily updates, photos, and videos of the research efforts. Studies include biological monitoring of marine...

Earlier this week, researchers from the University of Hawaii and the Hawaii Underwater Research Lab located the remains of a Japanese midget submarine. Found in 1200 feet of water, the submarine was sunk by the USS Ward just an hour before the aerial attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Most important, the discovery of the midget submarine offers concrete physical evidence that the United...

Earlier this week, a team of scientists, historians, and genealogists announced that they had discovered the identity of the "Unknown Child," a young boy who was found in the water around the Titanic several days after it sank on April 5, 1912. Using three small teeth from the boy's grave in Halifax's Fairview Lawn Cemetery and a blood sample from a Finnish woman thought to be related to the boy,...

This Web site contains an audio file of a story broadcast on National Public Radio earlier this month. The broadcast relates the poignant story of a four-year effort to identify the exhumed body of a 13-month-old child who died in the Titanic disaster. A metal medallion buried with the body serendipitously preserved a bit of the wrist bone, from which forensic scientists could extract...

Certain salvage groups and treasure hunting corporations have presented themselves with a certain veneer of heroism and righteousness that seems a bit unseemly and at times duplicitous to certain persons. This is the subject of the very well written piece offered by Professor Jerome Lynn Hall, who teaches anthropology at the University of San Diego and was a past president of the Institute of...